A Tale of Two Universities
By Jen Potter
Dr. Len Bass, Adjunct Teaching Faculty in the Master of Software Engineering Programs, was a presenter at the 2021 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Systems, Languages, and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH-E 2021) in Chicago. The conference was held in person, with virtual presentations for participants unable to travel, the third week of October.
The SPLASH-E conference was started in 2013 for software and languages (SE/LP) researchers interested in thinking about and engaging in activities associated with computing education of all types, such as pedagogically-oriented languages or tools; pedagogic challenges around SE/PL courses; bringing computing to non-CS communities; human studies and educational research.
The annual symposium gives researchers the opportunity to share their educational ideas and challenges related to software and languages, and to present their best ideas for advancing work in that area. The organization strives to bring together researchers and individuals with educational interests that emerge from software ideas or concerns.
In his presentation, titled “Teaching DevOps: a tale of two universities” [pdf], Dr. Bass and his coauthors Richard Hobeck and Ingo Weber from Technische Universität in Berlin, and Hasan Yasar, co-instructor for 17-646 DevOps and Continuous Integration, reflected on their experiences teaching at two universities in two countries, using an inverted classroom format. They described how they developed their courses, provided a brief analysis of the data they collected, and shared their lessons learned.